Patriot Hearts (24 page)

She wondered if he’d changed.

A stone bridge, and the deep glitter of water; a speckled flotilla of ducks. Then woods again, like the wooded mountaintop of Monticello, crisscrossed with paths and dotted with lawn and flowers. A park, like the great parks in London, Hyde Park and Grosvenor Square where Mr. and Mrs. Adams would go walking with Polly, during the ten days they’d stayed in that wonder-filled metropolis.

Mrs. Eppes, and Aunty Isabel, had given Sally strict instructions about staying at Polly’s side and staying in the house when Polly was out with the white folks—by the time it was known Sally would accompany her charge to France, Mrs. Eppes was as familiar as Aunty Isabel was with Sally’s boundless curiosity, her omnivorous craving to find out about anything she didn’t know. Neither the white aunt nor the black nurse had ever been to a city bigger than Williamsburg, but they’d guessed what temptations would flaunt themselves across Sally’s path.

“The girl’s never to be found when you want her,” the delicate, formidable Mrs. Adams had complained, on their second day beneath her roof. “A fine nursemaid for a child Polly’s age!”

But London—!

Even the birds were different in London: cocky little brown sparrows, instead of the silvery doves Sally knew in Virginia. The summer night-noise, too, was different, watchmen and carts and vendors all yelling, instead of the incessant clamor of night-crying insects. Her heart hurt for the songs of the mockingbirds, but in Grosvenor Square, walking in the twilight (when she should have been back at Mrs. Adams’s house!) she’d heard the indescribable sweet voice of the nightingale, that all the fairy-tales talked about.

All those crowded houses had their stables along separate alleyways that begged to be investigated. The Square and every street around it was alive with vendors who brought not only milk and eggs and vegetables from the markets but also hot pies, scarves, slippers, quills for making pens. The markets were jaw-dropping carnivals of activity, produce, servants, housewives, whores—Sally had never seen a whore, and had to quietly confirm with Mrs. Adams’s maid Esther that yes, those women with bright clothes and hair that startling color made their living by coupling with men.

Sally loved Virginia with the whole of her heart—loved its stillness, the sweetness of the woods, and the soft peaceful twilights. But the world was a marvel-filled place. Even Mrs. Adams had unbent, when Sally had asked, a little fearfully, if she might be permitted to read some of the books in Mr. Adams’s library: Coming back to books after four years without them was like sitting down at table starving. Like Mr. Jefferson, fat, grumpy Mr. Adams loved books, and like Mr. Jefferson both he and his beautiful wife were born schoolteachers.

There would be books in Mr. Jefferson’s house.

Had Mr. Jefferson changed?

Though her resentment at him had burned bitter in her for four years, she had never been able to eradicate from her heart the memory of his violin echoing in the darkness for his dying wife. The tireless months Mr. Jefferson had spent in Miss Patty’s room watching her fade from life returned to Sally’s mind, confusing the simplicity of her anger at all he had done. And not only to her: Even as a child of eight, Sally knew it took two to make a baby. It was impossible that Mr. Jefferson, a grown man who had read books and talked to doctors, wouldn’t know it, too.

“She was afraid, if she put him out of her bed, that he’d start lyin’ with Iris or Jenny,” Sally’s mother had said, naming the light-skinned housemaid, and the young wife of the plantation cobbler. Both had shown Mr. Jefferson—and a number of his guests at one time or another—their willingness. Being the master’s woman was a good way to get extra food and gifts, and to pass along to any offspring the inestimable gift of preference in an unfair world.

“Why you think she always smiled, and made herself pretty the way she did?” her mother asked. “It’s not just so he wouldn’t fret. It was to draw him back to her, to bind him. To keep him from going away. She’d rather risk death than lose him.”

Sally still thought Mr. Jefferson should have known better. And maybe, she reflected, recalling not only despair but horror in his eyes as fevers, weakness, infections ravaged the beautiful woman he had loved—maybe he had guessed at last what he had so frantically told himself wasn’t true.

On that last morning, on the threshold of autumn of 1782, nine-year-old Sally had been in the room when Miss Patty reached for Mr. Jefferson’s hand and whispered, “Swear to me that you will never give my girls a stepmother.” Miss Patty had had two stepmothers in succession. From what her mother had told her of them, Sally wasn’t surprised that the young woman had been grateful to Betty Hemings for her kindness and for the fact that she’d kept old Jack Wayles from needing to marry a third.

Mr. Jefferson had fainted from grief, and had been carried into the library next to Miss Patty’s room. Everyone went back into the sickroom—Mrs. Eppes and Aunt Carr and Miss Sparling, the young nurse that the doctor from Yorktown had left to care for Miss Patty—but Sally had lingered. She’d looked down at the ravaged unshaven face, the straight red eyelashes like gold against the discolored bruises of sleeplessness.
He knows it’s true. He knows that it’s he who killed her by possessing her.

Later she’d overheard some of his friends remark on the excessiveness of his pain, that in those first few weeks he could not even look at his own children without collapsing, and she knew why he couldn’t look at them.

Those things she’d remembered in her days at Eppington, even when her hunger for her family had been at its worst. She’d hated him, when she felt herself going half crazy with longing to be able to read again and when Mrs. Eppes came up with extra tasks and duties in the kitchen and the scullery to “un-spoil” a slave she considered inattentive and uppity. Yet she never could hate him with the whole of her heart.

In time her anger had altered, changed to a kind of slow-burning frustrated grief. For she knew that all things were the way all things were.

She had come to love Polly, and sunny-hearted baby Lucie, as if they were her own sisters. Mrs. Eppes had a baby daughter named Lucie as well: Polly would braid ribbons of identical color into both toddlers’ hair, and say the Lucies were her own twin babies.

Then in early October of 1784, shortly after Mr. Jefferson left for France with Patsy, whooping cough swept over Eppington Plantation.

Both little Lucies died.

“Mesdemoiselles, les voilà!”
M’sieu Petit nudged his horse up close to the chaise window, bent from the saddle, and pointed through the trees with his quirt. “
Les murailles de Paris.
How you say…?” He mislaid the English word, and shook his head with a wry smile, but pride and happiness sparkled in his eyes. Then he simply explained, “Paris.”

For the past mile, Sally had seen through the trees the tall walls of houses—palaces—set back from the road at the end of aisles of trees. Now ahead of them she saw the gray stone wall Mrs. Adams had told them about, which the French King had let his friends build so they could charge every farmer and merchant a fee to bring goods into Paris. Sure enough, a knot of carts and donkeys and wagons was clumped in front of the small gatehouse, while uniformed officials pawed through their contents.

And beyond the wall, distant over yet more trees, could be glimpsed rooftops, chimneys, church steeples. It looked like a fairy-tale, but it was a city, no mistake. The stench was too real for it to be a dream.

Polly’s face contorted with disgust. “Pew!”

And M’sieu Petit’s eyes twinkled.
“Ah, la puanteur de Paris! Ça te fait forte!”
He thumped his chest. “It make strong!”

Stench, movement, shouting as if everyone at the Tower of Babel were being slaughtered at once all rolled in with the braying of asses, the bleating of sheep, the barking of a thousand dogs…

Paris.

An official strolled over to let them through the gate, M’sieu Petit slipping him a coin to let them through without being searched. The farmers to whom the man had been speaking—or who’d been shouting at him—followed, still shouting, filthy barefoot men, unshaven and carrying sticks. The official in his blue uniform ignored them, like a white overseer brushing off the impotent anger of field-hands. Sally couldn’t tell what the problem was, but as the chaise went through the gate she saw their eyes: like the eyes of slaves who’re burning to torch the kitchen some night.

But on the plantations around Charlottesville, a slave with such anger in him generally worked alone. She’d never seen that many men—that many sets of smoldering eyes—together.

She was house-servant enough to be frightened.

Whatever was going on, somebody was going to catch it bad.

On the other side of the gate lay a great circular open space, surrounded by rows of trees, with streets radiating in all directions. Among the milling farm-carts and gaggles of sheep, elegant carriages maneuvered. The long avenue beyond was almost like a country road, lined with trees and kitchen-gardens. Here, too, were both market-carts and fancy carriages, strollers in bright silks and farmers in faded rags. Less than a mile along, the coachman drew rein at the first courtyard wall. M’sieu Petit sprang from his horse as the porter ran from the lodge to open the gates.

With a breathless start, Sally realized,
We’re here.

Polly understood at the same moment, sat up very straight, her eyes huge with panic, her hands pressing guiltily to her freckled nose.

The gate opened. The courtyard was cobbled. Servants in white shirtsleeves came out of the tall gray house.

M’sieu Petit opened the carriage door, helped Sally down first, then Polly. Polly’s hand was cold on Sally’s, like a frantic little claw. “He’s going to
hate
me—”

A man emerged onto the house’s front steps. Not as big as Sally remembered him from her childhood, though still a tall man. Either she’d remembered his hair being redder or it had faded, and though the gouges of grief and sleeplessness were gone from his sharp quizzical features, she saw where their echoes lingered still.

He wore a brown coat, and had one arm in a sling, wrist tightly bandaged. Yet he slipped it out to reach down and steady Polly as he scooped her up effortlessly in his strong arms.

The next second another pair of arms went around Sally’s waist from behind and Jimmy’s voice said in her ear, “Who’s this gorgeous lady? Can’t be my sister Sally! Sally’s skinny and got knock-knees—”

“I do not have knock-knees!” She whirled, striking at him as if they were children again together, laughing up into his eyes. Dark eyes—of all their mother’s children, only Sally had inherited her ship-captain grandfather’s turquoise-blue eyes. “You still as ugly as I remember, so you got to be Jimmy.” Which was a lie. Jimmy was good-looking and he knew it.

Then Jimmy looked past her and dropped back a step, and she turned, as Mr. Jefferson came up to her, holding out his left, unbroken hand. “Sally.” The soft, husky timbre of his voice brought back to her in a rush all the memories of Monticello, all the tales he’d once told her of ancient Kings. “You’ve grown.”

You sent me away. Like a dog or a bird.
But four years had passed. She’d learned that it was something all white men did.

So like the child she’d been, she peeped at him from under her eyelashes and responded meekly, “You’d have to write me up in your philosophical journals if I hadn’t, Mr. Jefferson.”

Something in the way his shoulders relaxed, in the old answering sparkle of his eyes, made her realize that, white man and adult though he was, he’d been as homesick as she.

He set Polly on her feet again and put his unbroken hand on his daughter’s shoulder, drawing her close. “Thank you, Sally,” he said. “Thank you for keeping such care of Polly, and for bringing her safely here to me.”

Behind them, servants were unloading trunks from the back of the chaise: Polly’s big one, and the small wicker box of Sally’s few possessions. Sally was only a little conscious of her brother’s glance going from her face to their master’s, of the speculation in his eyes. Mostly she was aware of Mr. Jefferson, the god of her childhood, the master who wrote of freedom but kept his slaves, the ravaged face of the man unconscious in the library and the retreating beat of hooves in fog, fleeing the place he loved but could no longer endure.